[SOLVED] Optimal way to add a new hard disk?

[johnpenguin]

I am planning to add a new hard disk, probably an 8TB one. I will not install Mageia on it, I will add it as additional storage.

What is the optimal way to proceed with this, including partitioning and adding it to the system?

Under another distro, I would use Gnome Disks to partition the disk in 3TB segments, and format the partitions using Ext4, then edit fstab manually to add the new partitions. Of course, only after running the long SMART diagnostics.

Is there a better approach to this under Mageia?

[magic]

You've got plenty of options available here.

For one have a look at drakdisk (available in the Control Centre under: local disks > manage disk partitions), you can partition, format, name and set the mount up in one go.

Ref: https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/6/en/content/drakdisk.html

[kajosim]

I also recommend using drakdisk. Drakdisk also did the partitioning / formating / mounting during the install of Mageia.
If you use other partitioning / formating / mounting tools you should keep on using that tool, otherwise drakdisk may get confused.
Years ago I did a manual edit of fstab and it confused drakdisk.

I have also added a 6TB HDD for extra storage of eg movies. In drakdisk I just made one big partition and mounted it /mnt/extra. As root I made myself the owner of it and by dragging from one Dolphin window to another I make a symbolic link (extra) in my home directory so that I have easy access to the new storage.

[xboxboy]

+1 for drakdisk

Why other distro's haven't swiped MCC is beyond me: MCC is the work of gods.

[johnpenguin]

I installed the new HDD and tried to partition it using drakdisk. It refused to write the partition table. As the HDD was totally blank, I used gnome disk utility to format it to GPT and restarted drakdisk, which from that point on worked as expected.

Drakdisk configured the disk into ext4 partitions, added the mountpoints (under /media) and wrote /etc/fstab properly (I chose the "user" in "options", so nodev, nosuid and noexec were selected as well). Afterwards, I edited /etc/fstab manually to add the nofail flag.

Another thing I found useful was adding labels to the volumes (using drakdisk), otherwise they appear on the desktop and various other places with generic names like "4TB Volume").

I resisted the temptation to

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chmod 777 /media/mountpoint

and instead used

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chown user:user /media/mountpoint

which gave rise to another problem, as some applications like qbitrorrent won't write to the partitions due to permission issues. I wonder what's the best way to counter this.

[filip]

I don't know it that's a good practise but it's possible to join those applications to your user group.

[doktor5000]

Would be helpful if you could post the output of mount and ls -ald /media/mountpoint when those partitions are mounted.

[JoesCat]

which gave rise to another problem, as some applications like qbitrorrent won't write to the partitions due to permission issues. I wonder what's the best way to counter this.

I ran into similar problems with some SD cards and a possible workaround is to create a subdirectory with the allowed permissions.
I prefer /mnt so I'm not sure if you get the same to happen with /media. Example:
chmod 777 /media/mountpoint/torrentsubdir
chown user:user /media/mountpoint/torrentsubdir

[johnpenguin]

It's strange but the qbittorrent issue wasn't related to the permissions of the partition. Running

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ps aux | grep qbittorrent

shown user as the owner of qbittorrent. Instead, it was related to the recent upgrade to 8, which I performed at the same time. I posted about it at viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14440

(The upgrade resulted in no application associated with torrents, so somehow qBittorrent wasn't able to have write access to the volume)

So everything works properly, though the qBittorrent situation was a bit weird to troubleshoot.

For completeness, the new partitions are owned by user with permissions reported as

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drwxr-xr-x